Ex Apple Engineer Spills the Beans on the Genius of iTunes

A guest blog post at Technology Review written by Ex-Apple Engineer Erik Goldman reveals some information about the inner workings of Apple's iTunes Genius.

As you may know, iTunes Genius really works, comparing music and dishing out all of our favorite tunes. Erik says that Apple starts by collecting user data from your local iTunes library and melding it into a larger database with information from other iTunes users.

Then, the super-secret algorithms take over, comparing data and giving users the perfect mixes. He notes that this is similar to the way Netflix gives users movie recommendations.

"These statistics are computed globally at regular intervals and stored in a cache," says Goldman.

He doesn't really reveal any other information, but does note if you want to learn more about the algorithms to "look at information retrieval algorithms, especially those that leverage the vector-space model."

Goldman note that if you want to learn more about the methods behind Genius, to take a look at the white papers published by the AT&T research team that won the Netflix prize for creating a better algorithm.